Wireless service providers are observing an exponential growth in mobile communications due to both an increase in consumer demand and commercial requirements. To ensure customer satisfaction, wireless service providers aim to deliver a high quality service at any location, to facilitate reliable and efficient mobile communications. Consumers can access a growing number of networks using a mobile device. These networks include, for example, 3G networks, 4G networks, long term evolution networks and Wi-Fi networks. These networks allow consumers to communicate voice, text, multimedia, and other data to and from other network entities, such as servers and other mobile devices.
The number of consumers accessing these networks and the amount of bandwidth used by consumers are rapidly increasing. With this rapid increase, mobile traffic is also increasing along the networks placing strain on networks and network resources. The strain can result in a bottleneck restricting data flow, such as at a cellular base station. When networks are strained, consumers can experience a diminished quality of service and become frustrated.
In traditional communications using wireless relays, one or more relays are deployed to help the communications between a source and destinations. However, due to a cut-set bound of wireless networks, a capacity of such relay systems is limited by the communication links from the source to the relay and the destinations.
On the other hand, the capacity can be increased in heterogeneous networks by deploying a large number of pico base stations. With high-speed backhaul links for the pico base stations, a system capacity is proportional to the number of pico base stations per unit area. However, the high-speed backhaul links are very expensive, and the heterogeneous network solution is not cost-effective as the number of pico base stations increases.
The above-described background is merely intended to provide an overview of contextual information regarding networks, and is not intended to be exhaustive. Additional context may become apparent upon review of one or more of the various non-limiting embodiments of the following detailed description.